


Meet Me in the Garden

by Quietbang



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Aging, Alternative Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Jewish Character, Caretaking, Dementia, Gen, Grief, Growing Old, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Not quite a fix it?, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Queer Gen, Well I think it's a fix it, but I'm reliably informed most fix-its are less sad than this one sorry guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:54:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28181214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quietbang/pseuds/Quietbang
Summary: After everything -- after disaster is averted yet again and they live to see another day, Erik takes Charles back to Genosha.Erik was never supposed to grow old.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 33





	Meet Me in the Garden

**Author's Note:**

> cw: death, dying, dementia and caring for someone with dementia, Holocaust references  
> Specifically, Charles is in the early stages of dementia, Erik is old and traumatized, this is broadly a mediation on aging and loss and what it means to care for each other. 
> 
> It's nowhere near as dark as it sounds, though.  
> Also hey, x-men fandom, it's been a while! By which I mean well over half a decade. This story exists in a mishmash of film and comic book canon but is probably best understood as a post X-men:Apocalypse canon-divergence where Erik and Charles went off to live in a small house in Genosha with a garden to live out their lives as grumpy Elder Gays. It's about grief and loss and how trauma doesn't leave when you get older, it just changes its shape. I hope you enjoy it. :-)

Erik was never supposed to grow old. 

By all rights he should be long dead, murdered like so many others, and when he had - when he was free, had freedom of a kind, when he let himself imagine a future and build one it was stolen from him, his entire life was a series of stolen dreams deferred and he was - he was so tired. 

He wasn’t supposed to be the one who lived, not when his earliest memories are of harm, of being forced into cruelty and guaranteed death, not when he tried so damn hard to build a world in which everyone could be free and had failed, every time. Not when every action seemed to be tied up with death and suffering and despair until he questioned if he even had the power to create good - he should have died, long ago. If things were fair. 

But things are never fair, not truly, and he found himself once again living a parody of a domesticity he had long denied himself, with a man who he had loved and hated in equal measure and who had loved and hated him in return. A man who remembered him at some times and not others, who sometimes returned to hurts long since healed -- or if not healed, at least scabbed over, dried out in a mutual dance of avoidance that had gotten him this far -- but a man who he had loved. A man who he did love. 

Love is a very dangerous word, Erik knew. Loving something meant signaling weakness, a place where your enemies could stab and twist the knife until there was nothing left for you and _it was your fault, it was all your fault, why didn’t you save them_ \- but he is old, and he is tired. He has so little left to give. 

The days seem longer, lately, but at the same time run together until Erik has little idea where one ends and another begins - they very rarely have visitors. Not even Charles’s beloved students visit -- those who survive made initial, feeble attempts, but never returned, and Erik is unsure if it because they cannot bear to see a man who is their father in every sense that counts lose his bearings, or because they do not wish to take tea with a man they believed to be their enemy for much of their life. 

(Erik never thought of them as enemies, how could he, they were mutants, new, young, fresh mutants, the cumulation of all he had fought for over the years, and when it came down to the wire they had fought as hard as anyone and they would hate to know that he was proud of them, that they were the products of the world he and Charles had wrought which taught them they were good enough, that they deserved to live without fear, that they deserved to be free -- it is a cliché of the villain to say “we are not so different, you and I”, and so Erik generously grants them their self-reflected hatred. He had no more battles to win, now. His journey was almost over.)

And so, Erik’s world grows very small, and becomes smaller by the day. He wakes at 5:30 - or rather, he “wakes” at 5:30, having spent the previous 6 hours tossing and turning and catching fractions of sleep from fractions of memories - , puts on the kettle, brings the paper in. Makes himself some toast and eats it in the kitchen, putting on some porridge for Charles’s breakfast - porridge had always been a favourite which is fortunate, the day is coming when swallowing will become difficult and eating will be yet another pleasure which Charles has had robbed from him by old age - he lays out Charles’s clothes on the bed before waking him. He is sharpest in the morning by far, and can manage dressing without direction provided the clothes are laid out for him, at least for now. 

He wakes him gently, hoping without hope that Charles’s telepathy is still sufficiently operational that he can feel the love and care suffusing down his arms and into Charles. Charles blinks awake, and smiles when he sees Erik looking down on them. It is a good day, today, then. 

Erik returns the smile, feeling it crease his lined face. “Good morning,” he says softly. “Coffee or tea today?”

It is good to give him choices. Charles was the smartest man in the universe, once - still is, although the files are clouded and cobwebs obscure the card catalogue of his mental library until he cannot be certain if the piece of information he finds is the one that he sought - and he can tell if he is being patronized. 

Breakfast follows bathing, Charles eating his porridge with brown sugar and cream while Erik munches on another piece of toast and smokes a cigarette with the window cracked. 

“Did you sleep?” Charles asks after a moment, his eyes gleaming with the keen intelligence that Erik fell in love with and that it seems only he can see has never really left. 

“Not well,” Erik admits after a moment. “It was a bad night.” 

_Bad night_ is such a useful phrase, encompassing as it might everything from a restless evening after a long day in the garden, aches magnified and bones creaking, to one of the nights where he catches ten minutes of sleep in between flashes of dreams, things that were and are and might have been, there are monsters in his head and exorcising them seems impossible and besides he is already _so old_. He has no more wars to fight. 

Last night had been one of the latter, and Charles clearly knows this, raising an eyebrow as he drinks his morning tea. “You really should talk to my doctor, you know. She could prescribe you some of those, um, you know, some of them.” 

“Tablets,” Erik says. “I hate the tablets. They make it worse, somehow.” 

“There must be some you haven’t tried.” 

“I’ve tried them all. None of them work.” 

Charles sips his tea, frowns. “Have we had this conversation before?”

They have had this conversation a few times. 

“Every time I have a bad night,” Erik admits, smiling to make the blow land more softly. “It’s fine. I know you worry about me.” 

"I just want to help,” Charles says softly. “You do so much for me.” 

“You’re here,” Erik says, matching his tones. “That’s enough for me.” 

\---

They finish breakfast, and once everything has been washed and put away neatly -- Charles was a terrible slob, always had been, but Erik insisted on everything being wiped down and put away after every meal -- they head outside to the garden. 

It is a beautiful place, full of life and buzzing with the chattering of insects and birds. Charles parked his wheelchair under a large magnolia tree, blooming in the early summer morning. Larks call to one another and swoop, catching insects from the air, and Charles smiles at them. Erik bends down to one of the beds, frowns at the slight yellowing of the carrot stems that poke up cheerfully from the raised bed. He touches a hand to the earth and closes his eyes, lets the metals sing to him until they tell him exactly that they need -- a touch more magnesium and they should be alright, the soil was a tad sandy and they had had heavy rains all week. 

He keeps a constant monologue as he works, making Charles laugh as he adopts a particularly villainous monologue -- 

“Aphids,” he says seriously, “I do not think you knew what you were getting into when you chose to invade my tomato patch. I will eliminate each and every one of you and you will rue the day you chose to invade our home.” -- 

And after a moment he laughs with him, feeling a strange weight lifted off of his chest. It was a good day, after all. 

They go inside for lunch and as they putter around in the kitchen, Charles setting the table - there is a helpful picture of a fully set table taped to the tablecloth, it is good for Charles to be as independent as possible but Erik could only eat with two forks and no knife so many times and it frustrated Charles to know that he was close to getting it right but not fully, reminded him too much of everything he had lost when he lost the ability to fully put it into words - the cruelty of this illness taking words away from Charles is almost too much to bear, not when he had loved them so - and when they are done and are both sitting in front of bowls of fresh tomato soup, with handfuls of fresh basil from the garden sprinkled on top and soft white bread to soak in it, Erik feels a warmth within him that is tinged with regret. He didn’t believe he was wrong, in all of this. He had been young and angry and hot-headed and he wished, oh how he wished, that he could change things, go back to his younger self and shake him, tell him to _talk_ to Charles, to talk while he still could, to tell him of his fears and hopes and dreams. He had mistakenly believed for so many years that there was no point in putting words to horrors when the listener could never fully understand, but age has a way of putting some things into perspective and he now knows that it may have been worth it to _try_ . He doubts he would have listened, though. The belief that you are truly alone, that nobody could ever understand so there’s no use in trying, is a powerful one. Particularly if you have already decided that you are doomed to an eternity of isolation because everyone you truly love is taken from you, which blinds you to the sight that the person taking them away from you _is_ you, this time. 

It is an awful and terrible thing to be alone, but sometimes it is so much easier than submitting to the mortifying ordeal of being known. 

“The thing is,” Erik says after lunch, smoking another cigarette as he looks out the window. “I wasn’t wrong.” He is sitting on the counter while Charles finishes his lunch - he eats slowly, nowadays, and Charles had eventually relented and permitted Erik to smoke inside provided he opened a window. 

(Even on his best days, Charles couldn’t really be alone. He had just enough of his faculties to get himself into trouble, as Erik discovered one day when he came back inside after smoking a cigarette to find every burner turned to blazing and several mugs scattered throughout the kitchen and a bewildered and angry Charles sitting amongst it all.) 

Charles smiles at that, a tired and fragile thing. He has lost so much, these days - his books, some of his pupils, time, time, _damn time_ \- but he remembers their fights as if they were yesterday. Erik knows that sometimes, memories of the past are the last to go, and it comforts him that even if the day comes when Charles doesn’t recognize his face he will recognize his stories until nearly the end. 

“What do you mean?” 

“Kitty sent us a card,” Erik says, seemingly out of the blue. “Wants to invite us to the bris.” 

Charles frowns, his mouth twitching with irritation. 

Before he can speak, Erik quickly moves to fill in the blanks. “She and Rachel are pregnant, remember? She’s due in a few weeks. Wanted to know if we could make it.” 

Charles frowns again, though this time with less anger. “Right, of course,” he says, although Erik suspects he doesn’t mean it. “Are we going, then?”

Charles doesn’t like parties, not anymore. There are too many people who he is expected to know, too many things he is expected to do, too many sounds and sights that confused and frustrated him. 

Erik smiles gently. “I’m not sure. What do you think?”

“You hate parties,” Charles says pointedly. “Can never get the right vantage point. They’re a security risk. That’s what you always said.” 

Erik feels his stomach twist because of course Charles remembers that, remembers him when he was young and spiky and rubbed raw until every movement irritated an old wound he didn’t remember getting, when it seemed like there was nothing in the world that was good or even neutral - every event another opportunity to lose everything. He still didn’t like them - you can teach an old dog new tricks but some things are etched onto our souls without realizing and Erik knows he will feel the thrum of adrenaline and the spike of cortisol in his veins every day until he died and maybe even afterwards - but there was something sweet and painful that Charles, even after all of this time, was conscious of his wounds. 

“I do,” Erik admits. “But I think we should go to this one. Only for a little while, and we’ll just sit at the back.”

“We can always leave if it gets to be too much,” Charles offers, and Erik laughs softly because he had been about to suggest the same and how had it come to this, two broken old men caring for each other when nobody else would or could. Erik had never talked about why he hated parties, not in detail, but Charles was smart enough to observe some things and assume the rest and maybe part of being in love was seeing where your beloved is rubbed raw even if you don’t quite know the exact cause of the wound. 

“Exactly,” Erik agrees. “That’s how I know I’ve won, by the way.” 

“What on earth do you mean?” Charles asks skeptically - not with the confusion or irritation that normally colours such a phrase, he sounds almost exactly like he used to, sardonic to a fault and if Erik closes his eyes they are young again and maybe he can make the right choice this time. 

“That little boy will grow up free. He won’t have to run, he won’t have to fight. He will be himself, fully himself, proud of who he is and where he comes from. He won’t ever -“ and here his voice grows thick and damn it all, he was growing soft in his old age in a way that would have seemed completely foreign to him, once “- He won’t ever be afraid. He won’t have to be.” 

“I’m sure he’ll be afraid sometimes,” Charles says softly. “Wasps, and the like.” 

Erik laughs, a small, broken thing. “You know what I mean, old friend.” 

Charles puts down his napkin and rolls over to the kitchen counter. He rests his hand on Erik’s back and says, quietly. “You’re afraid, aren’t you? You always have been.” 

In his younger days Erik would rage at that, rant about how it wasn’t fear, it was _caution_ , and it was keeping them alive and the only reason Charles didn’t feel it was because he was too cosseted to know it’s necessity - something cruel and mostly false that would make Charles lash out in return until they were having an argument that woke up half the house - but he is tired, now. Tired of fighting. 

“I’ve been afraid every day of my life since I was about 8 years old,” he says after a moment, pointedly refusing to turn his head to see Charles and his damnable, beautiful compassion. “It’s not something you grow out of.” 

He had thought it was, once. He doesn’t know how his younger self would respond if he told him that he would win, in the end, and he would still be afraid. He’d probably throw a knife at him. His younger self had been touchy like that. 

He leans his head against the windowpane, closing his eyes. 

“I’m so tired,” he admits after a moment, his voice low and rough. “I’m so fucking tired, Charles.” 

Charles hummed and rubbed his hand against Erik’s back. “I know, dear one. I know. You take such good care of me.” 

“I’m not tired of _that_ ,” Erik said quickly. “Never of that.” 

“No, but it can’t be easy” - and no, it isn’t ever easy but moments like this are the most painful because he knows that it cannot last, that these transient episodes of clarity will grow further and farther between until they don’t come at all but right now it is as though they are young again and it is agony. 

“Not always, no,” Erik agrees. There is no point in lying to him. He deserves the truth, if nothing else. “But I’ve definitely had worse patients. Mystique was, quite frankly, appalling at being ill.” 

Charles laughs. “Raven always was. I remember that, if nothing else.” 

He frowns at that thought, the reminder of his loss. “What will you do, Erik?”

“What do you mean?”

“What I’m gone? Not when I’m dead but when I’m not - _me_ any longer.” 

“Well,” Erik says slowly. “I assume that Charles will still like to sit in the garden and watch me work. I assume he will still like classical music and strong tea and he will still like to look nice and he will still want an extra scoop of ice cream after dinner. And if he doesn’t - if that Charles doesn’t like anything that this Charles does -I will learn about you all over again and I will try my best to make you happy - whatever you there is.” 

He smiles and turns at last from the window to look Charles in the eye, he wants him to get this while there is still a gleam of understanding in his eyes. “Not everyone gets the privilege of learning new things about the person they love when they’re our age, Charles. I’ll consider it a gift.”

Charles grins, quietly pleased, and Erik leans down and kisses him, closing his eyes against the stinging at their corners. Charles kisses him back, and for a moment everything is still and quiet and fragile and _right_. 

The ringing phone breaks them out of their embrace, and Erik moves to answer it quickly. Charles has an appointment the next day with his occupational therapist, and Becky - an all-too-chipper mutant in her late twenties - was just calling to confirm the appointment. “He’ll be here,” Erik says dryly. “Not as though we go anywhere.” 

Perhaps he would ask Becky about strategies for Charles, if they went to the bris. That would be a good idea. 

He walked over to the fridge and jotted a note on their calendar under the appointment time - _ask about travelling with Charles_ \- before turning back to Charles, who was looking at him with a frown. “Isn’t it lunchtime, Erik?”

Erik tries not to let his face fall. It was still a good day, he reminds himself. It was rare that Charles was as lucid as he was for as long as he was. 

“We already ate,” he says easily, “How about some tea and cake, though?”

“We really should eat proper food first.”  
“Just as a treat,” Erik lies gently. “C’mon, we’ll put on a record.” 

Charles fell asleep in his armchair - he shouldn’t nap for too long, Erik knew, or it could confuse him further - and Erik sits quietly, observing Charles’ even breathing. He frowns when his breathing picks up, and Charles’ brow furrows and he begins muttering to himself, small pained phrases - no, stop, my friend, I love you - and Erik sighs and steels himself against the ghosts of old heartbreak and calmly wakes him up. “You’re having a nightmare, Charles.” 

Charles starts awake, a look of confusion on his face. “What? What’s happening? Who are you?”

Erik felt a knife twist inside him. “It’s just me. It’s Erik.” 

“You’re _not_ Erik.” 

“Ok,” Erik says, humouring him. It is stretching into the afternoon, and Charles is always a tad confused when he wakes up. “Who am I?”

“I don’t know,” Charles says, turning pale. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t --” his breath is coming quickly now, and he is nearly in tears. “Who are you?”

Erik takes Charles’ hand and presses it gently against his own face. “Feel me. With telepathy, I mean. You’ll know.” 

He felt the slight prickling on the back of his neck that meant a telepath was trying to find its way through his psychic walls, and forced himself to relax. He would recognize the shape and character of the walls soon enough. Erik wouldn’t have to let him through - at least, not yet. 

_Erik?_ The voice echoes inside his head, too loud by half. _It’s Erik._

 _Yes,_ he says mentally, speaking the words aloud simultaneously. _It’s just me, old friend. I’m not going anywhere._

_You better not_ , Charles says. _I get so lost when you’re not here._

_I know, my love. I know._

They spend the afternoon in the garden, although Charles is positioned closer to him this time - he gets clingy after one of his episodes, as though he is afraid that if he lets Erik out of his eyesight he will be alone again - and helps him carefully dig a trench in the raised bed for a new crop of garlic seedlings. 

The bees are buzzing, cicadas begin to sing their chirping song as day shifts slowly into early evening, and Erik is - well, if not content then the closest thing to it. It has been a good day. 

“What will you do, old friend? Charles asks softly. “What will you do when I’m gone?”

“Miss you. Terribly.” Erik says, a tad shortly. Why is Charles talking about this? Does he really want to waste one of his good days on talk of the future?

“I’ll wait for you,” Charles says. “Wherever I go, I’ll wait for you.” 

“We’ve both died before,” Erik says. “I don’t know - I don’t remember if there _is_ anything else, anywhere to wait for me.” _Please don’t leave me_ , he doesn’t say. _It will break my heart again and my heart has been broken too many times, please, I can take anything else but I can’t take this, please don’t go_. 

He had lost everyone he had ever loved, and for so many of them he didn’t have a grave to visit, nowhere to lay flat stones and recite prayers he half-believed and half-remembered, no way to grieve. He was too old to learn how to do this again. 

“Will you give me a sign?” He asks after a moment. “Something we agree to. Some way I will know.” 

“Meet me in the garden,” Charles says, voice so soft it’s nearly a whisper. “I’ll be there - an English Robin looking quite out of place on the tree. I’ll send you a sign and you’ll know it’s me, you’ll know I’m waiting for you.” 

Erik closed his eyes. “I don’t - I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” 

“I know my mind is going, Erik. I know that the day is going to come soon where I don’t recognize you in the morning, where I don’t recognize _myself_ at all. I wish I could - I wish I could spare you that pain.”

“We should have had more _time_ ,” Erik spits out, frustrated. “We - you - saved the world so many damn times. We deserved more time. We deserved - _you_ deserved the world, Charles. I hate that I didn’t give it to you, that I didn’t realize what we had until it was too late. I know I said that I had won but I would give it all up if it meant that we had more time together. I mean it.” 

“No, you don’t,” Charles says. “Because you know that somewhere out there, right this moment, there is a mutant being born. A mutant who will never know what it is to be hunted. And they will grow up, and they will make some mistakes, as we all do - but their mistakes will not mean the deaths of thousands of people. And they will get hurt, but they’ll get better. They’ll fall in love, and they won’t be so weighted down by history and regret that they don’t see what they have until it’s gone. They will have children and they will grow up hearing them laugh and it won’t hurt them to hear it, it won’t remind them of all they lost because they will never have lost it. Because you won. Because we won. That has to be enough.” 

“I wish we got to enjoy that, too.” 

“Old soldiers never do, old friend.” 

Erik turns and kisses Charles on the top of his head, clutching him tightly until Charles’s face was buried in his shoulder and tears were rolling down Erik’s face, dampening Charles by the collar. 

“You will wait for me, my love?” He asks. “You promise me that, please. You will wait for me. And we can -- maybe we will get to enjoy ourselves, after all.” 

He doesn’t believe in the Heaven of Christian fairy tales, nor their childish and sadistic hell - but he’s not sure what he _does_ believe, has never been able to rebuild in his head the idea of a god, or God, or G-d, not after seeing him turn his back on evil- but if there _is_ a god, and if He does love His creations -- well, Charles, at least, had earned some rest, and hopefully by getting in ahead of him will be able to put in a good word. 

“Of course, dear one. You meet me in the garden when you’re ready to go.” 

_Ten Years Later_

Erik was tired. A bone-deep tiredness, a soul-tiredness, one that he didn’t think he could shake. His heart had been giving him some trouble lately, a lifetime of stress and tobacco catching up on him at last, and there were treatments, Kitty said- Kitty, who had moved to Genosha after Charles finally passed, who had fed Erik and clothed him until he roused out of a deep depression, who had said Kaddish when Erik tried and the words left his mouth, too heavy with ash and the weight of dead history, squeezing Erik’s hands as he mumbled along, stuttering to join her at the end of each line, _vimru_ _amen,_ before joining on the last line, frail and weak, _oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, v’al kol yisrael, vimru amen,_ with her son Danny beside her, just a kindergartener but already so curious and so full of life -- but Erik didn’t want the treatments. He had lived long past his time. 

He shuffled into the kitchen to see Danny already there, buttering toast studiously. “Where is your mother?”

“Oh, good morning, zayde!” Erik had said that was fine to call him but damn it all if it didn’t make his heart flip a little every time. Or maybe that was the arrhythmia. “ She’s just out at the car, she’s talking to Mama, Becca’s in trouble at school again.” 

“Again?” Erik took the toast from his outstretched hand and sat down at the table. “Wasn’t she just in trouble last week?”

“She glued her teacher’s skirt to her chair.” 

Erik raised his eyebrows. “With her powers?”

“Yeah, of course,” Danny said, looking at him like he had two heads. “How else would she do it?”

“Well, with craft glue, I suppose.” Erik retorted. Mutant children pulling pranks using their mutations - is that what it meant, to grow up without fear?

Remembering something Charles had said long ago, he looked at Danny seriously. “Daniel, I have a question for you. And I need you to answer me honestly.” 

“Um, ok. Of course, zayde.” He looked puzzled, but fond, and Erik was reminded yet again that this boy never knew him as _Magneto, Master of Magnetism_ \- to him, he is zayde, a grumpy old man who watches him play baseball and shouts at the ref when he makes a bad call. 

“Are you... afraid?”

Danny frowned. “Uh, what do you mean? Right now? Why would I be afraid, we’re just sitting in your kitchen.” 

“No, Daniel, I mean - ever. Are you afraid when you walk down the street? Or when you go to bed at night?”

“I'm not scared of monsters in my closet anymore zayde, I haven’t been scared of them since I was _eight_.” 

“No, I - When I was your age, I was scared, all the time. And by the time I grew up I was so used to being scared, that I forgot how not to be.”

“Oh,” Danny said, clearly sensing that this is inching towards That Which They Do Not Talk About. “No, I - things are different now. You know that.” 

“Right,” Erik said, “Right. Forgive me, I’m an old man. Sometimes I forget.” 

He ate his breakfast and swallowed his pills, waving off Kitty when she rushed in, full of apologies - “Go, pick up your delinquent daughter, I’ll be fine for the morning,” he ordered, before settling into the garden. His hands are knotted with arthritis now, making some parts of gardening difficult, and his bones always ache, so he sat on a bench beneath the magnolia tree, letting the sun beat down on his face. 

\---

A soft melody of birdsong wakes him up, and he blinks sleepily in the sun before he sees it. An English Robin, not nearly as bright and garish as its American counterpart, sits in the lowest branch, singing cheerfully at him.  
“Oh,” Erik says. “Is it time already?”

Another trill in response. 

Erik smiles and stretches, feeling the tension leech out of his muscles. “Just a moment. Let me enjoy the sunlight for one last time.” 

“We have time for that,” Charles says, and his voice is young and clear and sounds like home. “Oh, my dear one. We have so much time for everything.” 

**Author's Note:**

> zayde (also spelled zeyde/zeydie/zaydeh) is pronounced zay-dee and is the Yiddish for grandfater.  
> Other potentially interesting things -- the ways in which Erik supports Charles in making decisions which are as autonomous as possible, given the circumstances, are directly taken from real-life strategies frequently used by caregivers of people with dementia. Particularly in the sort of early mid-stages of dementia, people are often fully capable of, say, dressing themselves, or picking what they want to eat - but not if they are provided with a lot of options because their working memory is very poor and executive functioning suffers singificantly as a result. Occupational therapists often suggest doing things like taping pictures of a set table to the table cloth or laying out clothes for people in the order they need to be put on. You are also supposed to offer choice -- again, autonomy is really important -- but limited choice, so instead of asking "what do you want for breakfast?" you might ask "Do you want eggs or pancakes for breakfast?", things of that nature. And I suspect that anyone who has ever had a loved one with dementia or Alzheimer's disease knows this but for those who haven't experienced it -- it is very common for people's memories of their childhood and young adulthood to be the last to go, hence why it is not uncommon for older adults with Alzheimer's to mistake their adult children for their spouses or their parents. Charles does show more verbal fluency here than you would likely expect, but I was thinking about it and I think that telepathy would probably be a somewhat protective factor here? I fully believe we know what we want to say long after we lose the ability to make our lips move in the way we want them to. So I guess read Charles’ dialogue as being partially telepathic throughout.


End file.
